Moving beyond postinstall messages

[znarf]

Over the last years, Open Collective had been promoting the usage of postinstall messages. When activated, this would output a small message in the developer terminal each time someone install a given package.

This practice is highly controversial (see: #1625 opencollective/opencollective-postinstall#21) and we think it's now the time for Open Collective to stop promoting it. We'll let package maintainers use their best judgement to stop or continue this practice as they see fit.

In the meantime, we will engage within the npm (ie: npm/cli#187 npm/cli#246) and node (ie: nodejs/package-maintenance#220) communities to ensure a suitable alternative emerge.

Todo:

• remove postinstall from opencollective-setup
• ensure the community define a dedicated property in package.json
• ensure npm and yarn implement a command to output "sustainability" highlights

Update:

• Latest NPM RFC: https://github.com/npm/rfcs/blob/latest/accepted/0017-add-funding-support.md
• PR to implement it Add fund subcommand npm/cli#273
• Made a proposal to npm to support the "collective" property: https://github.com/npm/cli/pull/273/files#r342481026

[znarf]

According to our blog post https://blog.opencollective.com/beyond-post-install/, the goals of this issues were covered. It's not perfect but this is a good step in the right direction. Closing.